Abstract
The concept of ‘student voice’ is no less contested today than it was when first introduced formally into Scottish Universities over one hundred years ago. As a growing international movement, student voice balances precariously between forces associated with social justice and democracy, and those belonging to a neo-liberal agenda embodying tokenism, instrumentalism and, the enhanced competitive positioning of schools. In this special edition, divided into two parts, we examine the ‘space between’ these competing discourses through a series of articles from leading national and international practitioners and academics positioning student voice at the heart of leadership in education.
Part One of this special edition commences with an article from Pat Thomson presenting research on primary school students researching what they had learned from leadership activities. Pat argues that adult leaders need to find time to work with students on assessing student leadership and that such work might provide experience useful for other pedagogical changes. Dana Mitra, Stephanie Serriere and Donnan Stoicovy explore how leadership can help to enable student voice to occur in schools. In their article, they find that the relationship between teachers and the school leader is a critical context for enabling voice. Specifically, their findings reveal that the following concepts were important for efforts to enable and foster student voice: (1) a clear vision of school that is incorporated deeply into practice as ‘the way we do things here;’ (2) allowing opt-in strategies for teachers when possible; and (3) recognising that implementation across classrooms and personnel will vary depending on individual contexts, beliefs, and experiences. In the next article Hugh Busher argues that student voice is a key component in constructing discourses of respect, empowerment and citizenship in schools. This article takes the position that students are expert observers of school life and teachers’ practices and interrogates what they consider to be more and less successful approaches to those. It draws on three studies of student voices that were carried out by the author with colleagues between 2006 and 2011 in England and Lebanon in primary and secondary schools. Warren Kidd positions student voice as being essential in informing the practice and professional learning of trainee teachers. Incorporating student voice research-informed-practice into his pedagogy as a teacher educator, Warren argues that it is vital for pre-service teachers’ identity development to understand the agency and insight that many learners can bring to their own learning. This piece argues that student voice is essential for any critical pedagogy and in informing trainee teachers’ ontological development, it is the basis for relational agency. Gerry Czerniawski examines a case study of Pupil Voice brought about through collaboration between a secondary school (for pupils aged 11-16) and a university located in a large conurbation in Southern England. Building on data from focus groups and individual interviews with pupils and teachers, Gerry suggests that for pupil voice to be truly effective and transformative, policy makers, academics and practitioners need to move away from the ‘synthetic trust’ that typifies many pupil voice initiatives to one where authentic trust forms the cornerstone of all professional relationships in schools. The final article in this first section comes from Stephen Rogers and Helen Gunter. Drawing on interviews with 33 young people between the ages of 14 and 17, attending three English schools, the authors examine these pupils’ experiences of a personalised education system. Drawing on a conceptualisation of social practice and ethics drawn from Alasdair MacIntyre, they suggest that the conceptualisation of learning, and the relational processes involved, is being damaged through the interpretation of voice as a means of delivering instrumental data sets.
In Part Two we offer a colloquium on Student Voice where we publish shorter articles by academics, practitioners and senior school leaders working within international contexts. These colloquia represent, collectively, a ‘broader field’, offering both formal and informal pieces that consider the implications that student voice has for leadership and management in educational institutions and beyond. Building upon the more theoretical contributions to be found in the first part of this Special Issue we start with a short piece from Peter Kent, Headteacher at Lawrence Sheriff School in the UK. Peter reflects upon the role of the student voice in selecting and recruiting new teaching staff. Contextualised by some recent unsympathetic reporting in the UK media, Peter explains why for their school community, using the student voice to inform teacher recruitment has been successful. In the first of two contributions from the United States, Jennifer Cody and Lorraine McGarry, from Park Forest Elementary School describe their beliefs about the importance of using student voice as a foundation for increasing student efficacy, recognising student individuality, and addressing curriculum standards. Sharing examples from their classrooms, the authors illustrate how student voice can help teachers meet the needs of individual learners and prepare students for their role in the United States system of participatory democracy from an early age. John Smyth argues that the Australian school context has been something of a failed test case of trying to organise schooling around the tenets of the market as a regulating mechanism. In his short paper John argues that what is needed to interrupt and puncture this unfortunate policy trajectory, is to begin to include the desires, wishes, lives and experiences of young people – and the way to do this is through the promotion of policy approaches that are informed by and celebrate ‘student voice’. Roussel De Carvalho offers a fascinating glimpse into one particular aspect of Student Voice in Brazil. The Grêmio associations (similar to student councils in the UK) are the main pathway to student voice within schools and the main link to the principal. However, Roussel argues that evidence of the efficacy of ‘grêmios’ in dealing with issues of democratic participation is very much dependent upon the efficiency of the dialogue between senior management team and the students themselves. In our second contribution to this colloquia from the United States. Helen Beattie, recounts the story of how one state in America is systematically amplifying student voice through school transformation efforts across a network of secondary schools (grades 9 through 12; ages 14 to 18). The urgency of amplifying student voice, despite its complexity, the author argues, is justified by the thesis that ‘students are not the problem; they are part of the solution’. In the last article in Part Two, Helena Marsh, summarises a pupil voice research project in the United Kingdom conducted to investigate the influence that teacher-pupil relationships have on pupils’ feelings of engagement with their school. The study involved two year groups (12-13 and 14-16 year olds) in a rural secondary school in Cambridgeshire. Findings include pupils’ identification of the features of effective teacher-pupil relationships and their perspectives on how these have a positive influence on their levels of motivation and engagement at school.
Finally as an end piece to this special edition Alia Islam offers a personal reflection on the role and nature of student voice – its value and importance. Alia, currently an undergraduate student in the UK, used to work as a student voice officer in a college in east London and draws upon this experience in her reflections.
We hope that you enjoy this special edition and we thank all of our authors who have worked so hard in its realisation. We are particularly grateful to Philip Woods for providing, at the start of this special edition, a short commentary about its relationship to BELMAS during its 40th anniversary. We therefore recommend, as a starting point, that you read his contribution critically reflecting on the questions he poses in relation to student voice, leadership in education and future research.